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team.

So we churn out very good second violinists and very competent timpani players. We

have a surplus of them, in fact, and that's why it's a dicey way to make a living, with only

a few talented (and lucky) musicians making good money or holding steady jobs. Often

guest conductors don't even know the names of the people who make up the bulk of the

orchestra.

One conductor I know travels the world giving corporate performances, hiring competent

musicians with little notice in each city. He pays them hardly anything, because there are

so many to choose from. The surplus of cookie-cutter musicians has destroyed any hope

for the creation of value and a better-than-fair wage.

And yet . . .

And yet it's Yo-Yo Ma and Ben Zander and Gustavo Dudamel who are in demand, who

make great money, and who are having all the fun. These are the guys who don't fit in,

who don't follow the score, who know the rules but break them. They are artists. Many

others have been indoctrinated by the system and frightened by the resistance into

following instructions.

Standardized News

Journalism is another great example, because it's easy to glamorize the profession and

easy for people to confuse the value of the final product (honest, insightful news

reporting) with the cost of making that product. Media economist Robert Picard said,

Well-paying employment requires that workers possess unique skills, abilities, and

knowledge. It also requires that the labor must be non-commoditized. Unfortunately,

journalistic labor has become commoditized. Most journalists share the same skill sets

and the same approaches to stories, seek out the same sources, ask similar questions, and

produce relatively similar stories. . . .

Across the news industry, processes and procedures for news gathering are guided by

standardized news values, producing standardized stories in standardized formats that are

presented in standardized styles. The result is extraordinary sameness and minimal

differentiation.

It is clear that journalists do not want to be in the contemporary labor market, much less

the highly competitive information market. They prefer to justify the value they create in

the moral philosophy terms of instrumental value. Most believe that what they do is so

intrinsically good and that they should be compensated to do it even if it doesn't produce

revenue.

This is precisely what your organization is facing. Over time, drip by drip, year by year,

the manual was written, the procedures were set, and people were hired to follow the

rules. The organization gets extremely efficient at producing a certain output a certain

way . . . and then competition or change or technology arrives and the old rules aren't

particularly useful, the old efficiencies not so profitable.

In the face of a threat like this, the natural reaction is to try to become more efficient. Run

fewer pages, do some strategic layoffs (lay off the weird outliers or the expensive oldtimers). The New York Times recently responded by making their Sunday magazine

smaller and replacing the typeface with one that crams more letters on each page.

Of course, this isn't the answer. Doing more of what you were doing, but more

obediently, more measurably, and more averagely (is that a word?), will not solve the

problem, it will make it worse. Making the resistance happy is not the same as

succeeding. What do you say to your board of directors? You don't scare them with bold

plans, you hunker down, give in to the lizard, and die slowly instead.

The Huffington Post, which soon will make more money than any newspaper in the

country, threw out the rules. They have no printing plants, no revered style manual, not

even a fancy building. Instead, they're staffing up with artists and change makers. If they

succeed, it will be because they confronted the resistance.

"This Might Work"

You'd think that the biggest self-doubt would be that something you're